Stereoscopic playback technology introduces a mechanism for showing different pictures to the left eye and the right eye, and uses a parallax between the eyes to create the illusion of a stereoscopic video.
Although currently the mainstream application of stereoscopic playback technology is use in theaters and the like, a use mode for enjoying stereoscopic playback on a playback apparatus or a display at home is expected to rapidly become widespread in the near future.
There are various methods for displaying a stereoscopic video to users (stereoscopic display). For example, one common method is to use shutter glasses. In this method, the shutter glasses alternately block a viewer's left eye field of view and then the viewer's right eye field of view at high speed, while a display image for the left eye and a display image for the right eye are alternately updated at high speed in synchronization with the blocking operation of the shutter glasses. This operation results in the image for the left eye on the display being visible only to the left eye, and the image for the right eye on the display being visible only to the right eye.
In order to allow the viewers to view the stereoscopic video at the same frame rate as normal monoscopic video, the playback apparatus must play back two videos to be seen respectively by the right eye and the left eye, and the display requires a response performance twice as high as the response performance needed for the normal monoscopic video. This means, for example, that it is necessary to switch among at least 120 frames per second in order to display video consisting of 60 frames per second. Patent Literature 1 listed below is conventional technology disclosing a playback apparatus for home use, and Patent Literature 2 is conventional technology disclosing stereoscopic playback.